|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
A critical reexamination of Russian modernist cultural
historiography. Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for
Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures by the Modern Language
Association The writing and teaching of Russian literary and
cultural history have changed little since the 1980s. In Search of
Russian Modernism challenges the basic premises of Russian
modernist studies, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the
analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting audacious
alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking and speaking
about Russian and transnational modernism. Drawing on
methodological breakthroughs in Anglo-American new modernist
studies, Leonid Livak explores Russian and transnational modernism
as a story of a self-identified and self-conscious interpretive
community that bestows a range of meanings on human experience.
Livak's approach opens modernist studies to integrative and
interdisciplinary analysis, including the extension of scholarly
inquiry beyond traditional artistic media in order to account for
modernism's socioeconomic and institutional history. Writing with a
student audience in mind, Livak presents Russian modernism as a
minority culture coexisting with other cultural formations while
addressing thorny issues that regularly come up when discussing
modernist artifacts. Aiming to open an overdue debate about the
academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies,
this book is also intended for an audience of scholars in
comparative literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian
and transnational modernism, and researchers engaged with European
cultural historiography.
This book proposes that the idea of the Jews in European cultures
has little to do with actual Jews, but rather is derived from the
conception of Jews as Christianity's paradigmatic Other, eternally
reenacting their morally ambiguous New Testament role as the
Christ-bearing and -killing chosen people of God. Through new
readings of canonical Russian literary texts by Gogol, Turgenev,
Chekhov, Babel, and others, the author argues that these European
writers--Christian, secular, and Jewish--based their representation
of Jews on the Christian exegetical tradition of anti-Judaism.
Indeed, Livak disputes the classification of some Jewish writers as
belonging to "Jewish literature," arguing that such an approach
obscures these writers' debt to European literary traditions and
their ambivalence about their Jewishness.
This work seeks to move the study of Russian literature, and
Russian-Jewish literature in particular, down a new path. It will
stir up controversy around Christian-Jewish cultural interaction;
the representation of otherness in European arts and folklore;
modern Jewish experience; and Russian literature and culture.
Andrei Bely's 1913 masterwork Petersburg is widely regarded as the
most important Russian novel of the twentieth century. Vladimir
Nabokov ranked it with James Joyce's Ulysses, Franz Kafka's
Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Few
artistic works created before the First World War encapsulate and
articulate the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of
Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively. Bely
expected his audience to participate in unraveling the work's many
meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. In their
essays, the contributors clarify these complexities, summarize the
intellectual and artistic contexts that informed Petersburg's
creation and reception, and review the interpretive possibilities
contained in the novel. This volume will aid a broad audience of
Anglophone readers in understanding and appreciating Petersburg.
Andrei Bely's 1913 masterwork Petersburg is widely regarded as the
most important Russian novel of the twentieth century. Vladimir
Nabokov ranked it with James Joyce's Ulysses, Franz Kafka's
Metamorphosis, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Few
artistic works created before the First World War encapsulate and
articulate the sensibility, ideas, phobias, and aspirations of
Russian and transnational modernism as comprehensively. Bely
expected his audience to participate in unraveling the work's many
meanings, narrative strains, and patterns of details. In their
essays, the contributors clarify these complexities, summarize the
intellectual and artistic contexts that informed Petersburg's
creation and reception, and review the interpretive possibilities
contained in the novel. This volume will aid a broad audience of
Anglophone readers in understanding and appreciating Petersburg.
|
|